Now that the nineteen inches of accumulated snow is starting to melt, you may think I have nothing to complain about any longer. Well, you’d be wrong.
You may or may not know this, but I have two dogs. One about fifty pounds and the other around seventy. These dogs have been trained to poop outside, rather than in the toilet or on the carpet. Good for me. Good for guests. No one wants to visit a friend when their house smells of urine and other excrement on a regular basis.
Now that we’ve established that the dogs poop outside, let’s talk about Mother Nature pooping nineteen inches of snow on my lawn over a three week period. Is anyone seeing where this is going?
Three weeks. Three weeks, at least twice a day, two large breed dogs have been relieving themselves in the accumulating snow. They didn’t go on the pathways I shoveled for them. Nope. Instead, they used the pathway to jump over the ridge, land belly deep in snow, and do their business in the high tides. Do you know what happens to snow when warm logs are dropped on it? You guessed it. They sink and stay hidden until the snow thaws. Goodie.
Today is one of the first of many warmer days. And for those of you who can’t comprehend what three weeks of around zero degrees feels like; it’s okay, I’ll explain. Warm to us Midwesterners in mid-February is about forty degrees. Seriously, I didn’t wear a coat today. You’d be amazed how a swing in forty degrees changes society, especially when the big ball of gas we call a sun shines its heavenly light upon us. Convertibles have their tops off. The carwash line is twenty cars deep. And the craziest thing about the warm-up, people turn those frowns upside down–at least until they get home from work; because that’s when the real fun starts.
As Midwest dog owners know, there are two ways to pick up winter poop. Either wait until the snow melts completely and wear rubber galoshes through the wet grass (make sure to leave those shoes outside when you’re done), or pick it up in layers. I’m more of a layer kind of gal. As the snow melts and little morsels of brown love are exposed, I toss those thawing bundles of joy into, what I call, the poop bin. It even has a lid and a foot pedal for less bacterial exposure. Which then makes me wonder about bacteria levels when frozen. I’ll check with my scientist friends and get back to you.
In the meantime, I’m going to go outside and curse. And when I’m done, I think an after-work cocktail is in order to wallow in my hard labors of the day.